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| Sarah Morice-Brubaker |
The post below is by an
Associate Professor at Phillips Theological Seminary, Tulsa, OK. The school is associated with the now-liberal
(once fundamentalist, sectarian, quasi-southern, Baptistic) denomination Disciples of Christ. The
Professor’s name is Sarah Morice-Brubaker.
It would be a hoot to be student under her. Hello, Sarah! We would have a lot of fun. She might have a specialty, but classical and
historic systematic theology is not one of them. It’s like a lawyer attempting to practice
dentistry or an accountant attempting to fly a 747. This is a sorry and pathetic defense of the TEC’s whistling
in the dark and whistling past the graveyard.
The senselessness and absence of discernment in her article is stunning. Of course, we know that "theological liberalism" is more complicated than Ross Douthat's recent NYT op-ed piece, entitled "What Ails Episcopalianism?" This is a Professor of Theology? This is an alleged defense? Er, Sarah, there's no excuse for this incompetent piece of a dreary narrative. One is reminded of sighing of that old Scots Presbyterian cleric, Rev. Samuel Davies, when he said, "I retire to my library to avoid the dreary tedium of mortals." No wonder 1000s of the faithful have
departed. I had a top drawer sub Skipper, an Academy man, cradle Episcopalian, tell me of his and his father's departure from the TEC. I'm developing a series on my many interactions with liberal clerics...easily 30 of them at least. I’m half tempted to do the same,
ditch the church, but fidelity argues otherwise. Indifference
is not neutrality, but a decision. Many faithful are still found in the liberal
hellhole because they’ve not been taught, yet they simply affirm their faith,
e.g. the Creeds, and hope the Bishop doesn’t come around too often or insist on
the national agenda. (We have a wonderful 84-year old, long story there, a real joy at our local TEC). But, I digress. Here’s…….Sarah
(drum roll please).
Recommendation, Sarah: start from scratch, start over, and actually deal with the issues, not worthless anecdotes. Give the history of 19th-20th century liberalism, exegesis, systematics, confessions, liturgies, creeds, the Bible and get to the real issues. Dreary and pathetically weak, I tell ya.'
We apologize for the formatting that is irregular and incorrigible for some reason.
For Douthat, Church Either Uncompromising or a Secular
Den of Promiscuity and Irrelevance
Ross Douthat is telling stories again. He is a very
good and compelling storyteller, which you can tell from the fact that he can
tell (beg pardon) an old old story, and somehow it’s still fresh and
interesting.
You probably know this story: it’s about a character called Liberal
Christianity, and how it fatuously chased after every faddish cause that came
down the pike in a misguided attempt to be relevant and popular. But then—oh,
the irony!—it turned out that people who bothered with Christianity actually
wanted churches that stood by timeless principles, and so they left. So sad!
Now Liberal Christianity is left mostly alone, a victim of its own stinking
desperation. For it has become, in his words, “flexible to the point of
indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form,
willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology
entirely in favor of secular political causes.”
After a while, it does wear on one to have to keep saying, “Pardon me, but
it’s a bit more complicated than that.” But: Pardon me, but it’s a bit more
complicated than that. Complicating factors have a way of making a story less
exciting to both reader and writer, though, so I shall try to put this in
narrative form.
Remember the Sweet Valley High book The New Girl? For the
uninitiated, it’s about a really obnoxious new girl named Brooke who is
horrible to everyone. (SPOILER ALERT: She is actually hurting on the
inside!!!!) Twins Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield invent a fictional third
sibling—Jennifer, whom they take turns impersonating—as part of a scheme to get
back at Brooke.
Yeah, so this is kind of like that, only in reverse: Instead of two people
pretending to be three people, we have (at least) three characters being
conflated into one. (Conflated by people who, honestly, should know better.) Because Liberal Christianity is, it turns out,
not just one strand of intellectual and spiritual reflection, but at least
three. So, to put a few distinct strands of liberal Christian thought into a Sweet
Valley High-inspired, one-dimensional-U.S.-high-school pastiche, it would
be like we had:
Mrs. Ernestine Peck, the lady who directs
the morning bus traffic. She is wealthy enough that she doesn’t need the
income, but she does this out of the goodness of her heart because she thinks
kids today—with their fancy phones and their
Facespace-or-whatever-it’s-called—need to see someone like her. Maybe it will
inspire them to something better in life. Of course, it’s not really their fault.
It’s the parents. They’re too permissive, and they work far too many
hours, and they’re not reliable, and they don’t limit screen time, and even the
liberal ones do activism all wrong. She and her friends marched, way
back in the day, and this is the thanks they get! Mrs. Peck is the sort of
person who sincerely can’t fathom why poor people don’t wear natural fibers;
take up yoga; or cook fresh, organic, locally-sourced produce every day.
Religiously, Mrs. Peck basically thinks that the more spiritually evolved you
are, the more you come to resemble her and her friends: vague, spiritual,
comfortable, and tastefully harrumphy. She likes hymns from the 1970s and is
convinced they will appeal to “the youth.”
Zach Radix, an
intellectually-serious-bordering-on-brooding student, who, from the time he
could talk, has protested against everything that’s unfair. He knows that he
caught some breaks, having been born a dude in a world that rewards being a
dude, and having wound up with parents who can afford fancy camps and music
lessons and whatnot. His older brother is gay, and Zach witnessed too many
homophobic insults directed at his brother to think that so-called “traditional
marriage” is an innocent concept. Zach runs the school’s chapters of Amnesty
International and Men Can Stop Rape. Sometimes he’s the only one at the
meetings, despite the hours spent putting up posters and pestering his friends.
Turns out those two clubs are not as popular as, say, varsity sports, or the
spring musical. But Zach isn’t doing this to up the numbers. Some things are
more important than being popular. Zach attends a church that has been very
public about being open and affirming of GLBTQ Christians. If that church ever
considered muting its commitment in the hopes of appealing to moderates, Zach
would be out the door. Too much is at stake to play nicey-nice.
Dr. Sally Tinker, the school counselor
and student council adviser. Teenagers, you will be shocked to learn, do not
always elect the best-qualified student council members. They are occasionally
swayed by other concerns, like popularity. Rather than spend a lot of energy
trying to convince teenagers to be more thoughtful about their elected
representatives—not her place, and besides, there’s little chance of
success—Dr. Tinker tries to get the best outcome possible for the very specific
projects with which student council has been tasked. This takes compromise. She
often finds herself saying things like, “I understand you don’t like Trixie.
I’m not asking you to like her. I’m asking you to be on the decorations committee
with her, which will involve only going to one meeting and hanging streamers.
The rest is your own personal business.” Dr. Tinker attends a church that’s
easy to get to, full of people she can relate to, where her kids like Sunday
school, the music is nice, and the religious beliefs are given a soft sell. By
the time Sunday rolls around, Dr. Tinker is exhausted and doesn’t want to be
scolded or harangued.
These are three really different ways of being religious. Could you raise
thoughtful criticisms of any of these? Sure. But if we’re going to talk about
something called “liberal Christianity” (a phrase, by the way, that is too
often expanded to simply include everything the critic doesn’t like) it will
include all three of these characters, and their entrenched disagreements. You
don’t get to posit liberal Christianity as a single system that’s meant to
account for all of these ways of being religious, and then have your big gotcha
be that—surprise!!—it doesn’t. You’ve just conflated your Wakefields, so to
speak. Frankly, it gives the impression that you’re not arguing in good faith.
(Of course, if you were arguing in good faith, presumably you’d also take
into account things like: 1) Demographic shifts that caused mainline
Protestants to move away from the big expensive church buildings their parents’
generation had built, often along—d’oh!—streetcar lines. 2) The fact that
religious attendance is down across the board, as is confidence in
institutional religion. And 3) The fact that technological advances have made
it more and more possible for someone to surround herself only with people who
agree with her and confirm what she says. This made certain liberal
endeavors—such as the practice of listening to your opponent as though you
might have some basis for genuine conversation, and in any case you’re stuck
with each other—seem a little outdated. More’s the pity.)
But if we’re going to talk about internal contradictions, let's talk about
the one where only certain things count as theological convictions. In his recent book Bad
Religion, Douthat gives some hallmarks of the kind of grounded, stable,
uncompromising, historically-informed Christianity he thinks is capable of
standing on principle and enduring through time. Those hallmarks include belief
in the incarnation, atonement, Trinity, virgin birth, everlasting life, and
authority of Scripture. True Christians believe these things. Christian
traditions that don’t espouse them amount to “pseudo-Christianities.”
Likewise, in this most recent column, Douthat claims that “the leaders of
the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering
anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism. Which suggests
that perhaps they should pause amid their frantic renovations and consider not
just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would
defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world.”
Aha. So there’s “defending something uncompromisingly to the world” on the
one hand, and “changing historic Christianity to offer just secular liberalism”
on the other? Nope, sorry. That framing won’t do. It’s a set-up, and I think we
need to call shenanigans.
Witness! (Ahem.) “From what we know of him, Jesus resisted the
self-important piety of the powerful, and stood instead with the ones they were
oppressing, and in so doing revealed how God is. Therefore, I think following
Jesus means doing the same in the very different context in which I live, and
specifically resisting the institutional sexism and institutional homophobia
which have informed so much of Chrisitian piety. This will mean that I can’t
spin romantic and rosy tales about What The Church Has Always Taught. It may
not be popular. But I believe it to be true.”
This is a theological claim about who God
is and what Jesus reveals about God. It is a principle. It is one that it's
possible to hold, and defend, at great cost to oneself. It’s a claim around
which communities can gather. You can teach it to your kids. Worship services
can be constructed around it. It can, and does, inspire people to do things
that are hard and unrewarding. You can care about it so much that popularity
becomes secondary.
Douthat disagrees with it, presumably, but disagreement isn’t really the
issue here. That claim does not simply factor out to secular liberalism without
remainder. If he thinks it does, he needs to make that case. He needs to
explain why his argument isn’t a circular one wherein “Real Christian
convictions are A, B, and C, but liberal Christians say D, and therefore
liberal Christians don’t have real Christian convictions.” And he might do
well, moreover, to listen to why some people have found his checklist
implausible. Unless “uncompromising” has truly come to mean just pronouncing
what you know to be true, in which case I suppose there’s little point in
attempting any sort of conversation at all. Back to stories, then.·
